Leevi Haapala: “We’ve been following the Baltic countries since the early nineties, collecting artworks as well…”

(3/2015)

 

Evelyn Raudsepp (ER): You have previously worked at Kiasma as a curator...?

Leevi Haapala (LH): Yes, I have been here since Kiasma opened in 1998, so I have its whole history behind me. I have worked in different departments; first I was a researcher at the Central Art Archives, taking care of contemporary art documentation and giving lectures, doing research. I also curated time after time something for changing exhibitions and collections. So in that sense, I have been following all my generation of artists and the generations younger than me, I have quite a good knowledge and understanding of what is happening here in art life. There are some traces still in our programme, since I left as a curator a year ago; for example, Markus Heikkerö's exhibition this autumn, which I was involved in initiating.

ER: Are you planning to continue curating? Is it possible besides leading the museum?

LH: It is two different practices and two different professions as such. I do hope to curate once a year or once every two years. The basic guidelines for the future and what is expected from me are set, as we are responsible to the ministry, our audiences and the Finnish National Gallery. I will be part of selecting, together with our curatorial team, for the main exhibitions in our programme, but of course they will do the actual work of building them up. The programme for 2016 is already fixed, we'll make little changes to the end of the season, but 2017 is the empty, a clean table for me.

We are working almost every fifth, fourth year with the "ARS" exhibition tradition; the next one will be in 2017. Every Kiasma director usually has one option to do that big show, I wanted to start with that, because I'm still involved with the art life and more focused in the way of thinking in a curatorial way.

ER: Would you be the curator for the "ARS 17" exhibition?

LH: Definitely, I will be a member in the curatorial team. I will bring my insight to the guidelines and for the basic theme. I worked as a Praxis Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts for the curatorial studies now one year before I came here. I delivered the lecture series called "Affective Image" and it was about the digital turn. I won't say the "ARS 17" exhibition will be exactly about that, but something related to it. I would like to bring some very contemporary issues to the exhibition and not limit it for example geographically, but looking more closely at what topics artists are working with right now.

ER: Your background has also been as a researcher, how do you think this will help in the director's position? Will it affect your decisions?

LH: Of course it will. It helps me, because I know the researchers and scholars from the field. I'd like to bring some visiting curators here from time to time, or artists who could be part of our curatorial team. There are also many seminars and lecture series happening in Kiasma, so I would like to see how to make those work together with our exhibition themes.
Furthermore, we have opened with the whole Finnish National Gallery an online portal for research – research.fng.fi –, so we could publish articles, which are for example part of our catalogues. There are also many curators in the gallery, who are working with their own research topics along side their work and many conferences, seminar papers, which were not archived properly. We'd like to collect that knowledge together. We can also create an internal network and share our special areas and research interests with our personnel.

ER: Will it include somehow the library?

LH: Yes. Pirkko Siitari, the former director of Kiasma, started already years ago building the research library for the audiences. All these years it has only been for professionals, artists and curators by appointment, but by the end of this year it will be open to the public, next to the fifth floor gallery space, including the databases for our collections and video archives. Along with access for wider audiences, I'd like to build inside links to the library at exhibitions. So there are some special materials, which are not visible in the actual exhibition, some research materials that give more perspectives to the audiences. And maybe also open up artistic research, based on their ways of working.

ER: Coming back to the digital turn – how could a museum be more digital in response to this shift? Is there a need for it?

LH: That would really make a lot of sense also with the research library. Besides that, I'd like to build an online gallery for our future new media collection, which would include works made only for online, collecting some of the works by international and Finnish artists. That could be part of the research library, but also an exhibition for everyone to see from their mobile phones.

It should also be discussed whether the weekly guided tours are relevant. The amount of participants in the public guided tours is not so big all the time – exceptions are special days; for example, family days with some 3,000 visitors. Maybe there should be some kind of mobile applications for different thematic guided tours and not only traditional audio guides.

ER: What do you think, how much can a museum director affect the museum artistically?

LH: It is of course a collaboration between our curators, producers and so on, but the main guidelines, which directions to go, what are our targets, which audiences to grasp, is very much affected by the museum director. In my daily job I will probably have time to focus on artistic content only one day a week, and the rest of it goes to discussions with the administration, personnel, fundraisers, and working with our different partners. I also belong to the board of directors at the Finnish National Gallery, where we need to think about the whole institution of which Kiasma is one important part.

But I would still like to be up to date with the art world, visiting different biennales and the main art fairs. My directing should be carried out so that we all at some point agree on the programme and head towards the same goal, including the exhibitions, collections and theatre department together.

ER: What is your vision for Kiasma? Does it need any changes or where should it go in the next five years?

LH: The next five years is exactly my time here. I'd love it if we could take more seriously what is happening right now, so being a very contemporary art museum, not looking backwards that often. Of course, we need to bring in some key figures, some classics, who have a kind of a main role from the early nineties, showing why we are where we are.

I would like to bring in artists who work more widely between the visual arts and performative arts, making the fact that we have a theatre here more visible. So the performative elements would also go through the programme and to show that it's part of visual culture.

One aspect that I'm focusing on is that the marketing department has identified over-35-year-old educated women as one of our target groups. From our latest questionnaire it was measured that 50–55% of our visitors (and sometimes even more) are under thirty-five. But I'd like to still keep that in mind and build our programme so that more artists of a similar age would be talking to those audiences directly. Furthermore, we have shown a lot of young Finnish art here, but I'd like to bring in the same generation artists from the international art scene.

And now, after the renovations, when Kiasma's whole building is looking so lively and beautiful inside, I'm wondering with our curators, how could we use our renovated facilities; for example, the new acoustics, hanging points and light blocks, and the technical improvements within the series of five galleries.

I would really like to emphasize that when you enter Kiasma, you can feel that you are part of a contemporary art museum and it's not turning into museum of modern art.

ER: But how contemporary is it possible to be when you are planning two years ahead? For example, if we compare with the private market system, which can very quickly react to the contemporary art world. How can a contemporary art museum stay fresh in the field?

LH: In Kiasma this has been done with thematic exhibitions. We have one big theme for a year or for a season and to operate inside that is easy. You can bring in artists from different generations and also very fresh ones, who are not yet so well known in the art world and you can put them along side iconic names. We have also used the same thematic tactic in the collections exhibitions. I checked now that in our latest exhibition "Face to Face", there were artists born in the 1980s, but in the previous exhibitions most of the artists were born in the 1970s. It's now already starting to come closer to our times.

That is one way to be fresh in the field, but another way is when we are quick enough in supplementing our collections. Of course, our curators are following younger generation artists, who have promising careers so far having had one or two solo shows already and worked internationally in some way too.

ER: How do you see Kiasma's position in the international art world? Or is it directed more towards Finnish audiences?

LH: During our history, Kiasma's role has shifted slightly depending mainly on the director. I'd like to bring back the idea that we're not only for Finnish audiences. It's also in the Finnish National Art Gallery strategy that we should be one of the most vivid and renowned art museums in Northern Europe. That is something we are now looking towards and one way of doing this is bringing people and journalists here, but also bringing excellent, well-known artists, not only showing Finnish art.

ER: If a Guggenheim museum is built in Helsinki, how would this affect Kiasma?

LH: We will see what happens with that. It has been a very long and deep discussion about contemporary art, modern art and what are museums for in Finnish society. It has been going on for over two years now, and by the end of this year it needs a political decision. Guggenheim has already announced the winner of the architectural competition (Paris firm Moreau Kusunoki Architects – E. R.), despite the fact that they don't have a yes or no answer for the whole project yet.

They have been promoting it with economics, tourism and technological innovations. They've done the field research very well, about what we have and what are we lacking. Finland is very strong in architecture and design, but the venues aren't in accordance with that, so we have much more to offer the audiences. So in their presentations, they have been focusing more on architecture and design, whereas art is part of the concept, but not mentioned that often. Kiasma is slightly in a different field. If Guggenheim comes here, we will definitely work together, at least with the marketing and the audience level. The discussion around Guggenheim Helsinki is sometimes so black and white. Of course it's an international brand, but the main question is always the funding of the project, whether it will come from Helsinki city and the state, or there are enough private and market partners to build up the museum. I see it as a wider question than just "Guggenheim: yes or no?"

We already have in this small city centre, very close to each other, four institutions working in the field of contemporary art: across the street (The interview is in the director's office at Kiasma – E. R.) will be the Amos Anderson museum under Lasipalatsi; you can almost see Helsinki Art Museum from here and Kunsthalle Helsinki is also behind the House of Parliament. So we need to make some sort of plans together and work more closely to see the profiles, differences, whether we are working with the same audiences or having some special targets, or how would we make it stronger for wider audiences, tourists and so on. It is at least good news for visitors in the following years.

ER: Is the collaboration already strong between these museums or is it something you'd like to develop?

LH: It is something we should definitely develop. Our position among these museums is that we are the only museum focusing only on contemporary art. I think we should make some marketing plans together or build a structure for that. Or even to plan some programme together...?

ER: Do you have any plans for the funding?

LH: We are not in the state's budget anymore; our income is now based mainly on lottery money (which of course comes from the state monopoly) and some part comes from the ministry of culture and education. So around 75% is funded by public sources and the rest is from different partners and ticket sales. We are under the umbrella of the Finnish National Gallery, which has started a new fundraising project. The idea is to collect money during the next two years, first from private donors like foundations and corporate partners and then it will change more to an everyman thing. The aim is to collect altogether 8 million euros, which the Ministry of Education and Culture will multiply by 2.5, so it will be 20 million. This will be invested and from the profits we can support the programmes in the museums. This is one way of raising funds. The other way is that some companies don't want to give us money, but they like to be our partners in other ways; for example, working as our marketing partners, supplying necessary assets, infrastructure and materials. Of course we have to start negotiating about the funding in the very near future.

ER: Where will the money be invested?

LH: It's not decided yet, the project has just started. It will be decided by the investors on the board of the Finnish National Gallery and the plan is to hire specialists along. The reason for this kind of experiment with funding is the political times and the way things are changing from state funded institutions to the public foundations.

ER: Do you see any possibilities for collaborating with Estonia in the coming years or collaborating with the Baltic countries? It has been a few years now since Kiasma purchased Kristina Norman's "After-war" (2009) for their collection.

LH: I actually have a plan to make one big exhibition about this region, altogether with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We've been following the Baltic countries since the early nineties, collecting artworks as well, but now it hasn't been that active anymore. I really enjoyed the Estonian pavilion and Jaanus Samma's installation in this year's Venice Biennale and Latvia was also very strong. The idea for the exhibition is just in the very first phase, we need to talk with our curators and make some trips to meet artists, gallerists and museum personnel in the Baltic countries, but we will definitely make the exhibition in the coming years. I think we should know our dear neighbours more closely as well.

 

Evelyn Raudsepp is currently an MA student in the department of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She also has a background in Theatre Studies from Tartu University.

 

 

Kiasma
Photo by Petri Virtanen (Finnish National Gallery)

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